By Rick Boettger and Gemini*

Our two-party system has led to half of us not caring how crooked our politicians are. Remember, True Blue and MAGA Red voters are down to only 25% of the electorate each now, with we independents having a large plurality. But our primary process leaves these two minority extremists in control of Congress. This has given us Trump, Hunter Biden, and Tony Fauci, unleashed.

At the top, I’ll argue that crimes are roughly equal, with Trump able to take on the top two Blue criminals all by himself. It’s quite a list of malfeasances. What is so funny weird (not ha-ha) to us indies is how each side wholeheartedly denies all their own guy’s crimes, while heating the tar and feathers for the enemy’s.

For the independent minds who watch this circus in absolute exhaustion, the symmetry of the rot is staggering. Take the moral and personal degradation. The True-Blue Left is perpetually outraged by Donald Trump’s history of sexual predation, culminating in a federal jury finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. To the Left, this behavior makes him entirely unfit for human company, let alone the presidency. Yet, these exact same voters look completely past Hunter Biden’s personal depravity—a man who weaponized his family name for millions in foreign cash, spent years in court trying to legally erase his own innocent daughter born to a dancer, and fought to deny her the Biden name. The Left calls Trump a predator but dismisses Hunter’s behavior as a mere private family tragedy.

The exact same hypocrisy paralyzes our institutions, where dangerous denialism has replaced accountability. The establishment Left fiercely defends Dr. Anthony Fauci as a saintly martyr of “The Science,” completely ignoring how he used semantic gymnastics to hide high-risk gain-of-function virological engineering in Wuhan from federal oversight When pushed into a corner by a Senate subcommittee, Fauci hid behind the Fifth Amendment 111 times to avoid a perjury trap. The Left screams that Trump is a dangerous “denialist” who subverts the rule of law and election integrity. Yet, they see no irony in Fauci’s administrative denialism—using bureaucratic self-preservation and linguistic technicalities to deny his agency’s complicity in a global catastrophe.

This is the ultimate double standard of the modern partisan mind: if our team does it, it’s a bureaucratic nuance or a disease of addiction; if your team does it, it’s an unpardonable sin.

We Indies refuse to carry water for either tribe. Trump’s total disregard for civic boundaries, Hunter’s mercenary exploitation of familial love, and Fauci’s subversion of scientific transparency are all symptoms of the exact same systemic sickness. If we want to honor lur Constitution, we have to enforce the rules equally. It is time for the independent plurality to stand up and stop letting the hyper-partisan 50% dictate the boundaries of truth.

*Working with AI is more like my academic co-authoring with Tetlock, Staw, and Greer, as opposed to its being just a ‘researcher’ in a footnote, as my Google AI modestly prefers.

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